Just a nice quick and dirty sound design tutorial for you this week guys – create your own 808 bass sounds!
The Roland TR-808 is such a classic machine that people tend to call any boomy, subby kick an ’808′. The truth is that the huge great ‘booooooooom’ sound that people associate with them doesn’t come straight out of the unit; whilst the TR-808 creates a really meaty sound it’s the extra effects that people have used over the years along with modifications, clones, and generally sounds that are in the spirit of the 808 that have turned the 808 into sub kick royalty.
How to Make 808 Kicks (or even better!)
In this video – which is a quick and dirty look mid OD studio refresh – we’ll show you how you can go about creating a huge subby kick (or even just a deep sub bass) that you can use straight on a track, layer underneath another kick for added grunt, or use as the basis for some extra processing to get a really unique sound. 808s have never been out of fashion, but recently they’re everywhere, and you can get such a nice sound out of a synth with way more configurability than you can with a sample. If you learn how to make 808 kicks – or at least, the kind of sub kick that a lot of people associate with the 808 – you’ll never have to spend precious time searching through a folder full of samples until you find the perfect one again! We’re using Reason’s simple Subtractor synth to make the bass kick, but you can use just about any subtractive synth to do exactly the same thing.
Nobody’s looking forward to the OD studio refresh more than us but I thought you’d appreciate something ugly over nothing beautiful, and we’ll keep putting out tutorials and videos until we can get things sorted out properly again! Let us know what you think and if you’ve any suggestions, let me know!
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